IT’S HARD TO BE HATED BY JERKS

Char

Every week, I look forward to reading Charlie Hebdo: for its hilarity, its intelligence and its politics. But, recently, there’s been a backlash against it. The latest attacks are just with words, yet they are notable for their ignorance. The spectacle of PEN authors ranting about something they never read might be comical – if it weren’t pathetic. Editors who know better indulged these celebrities, too, fanning the flames in hopes of gaining a few more readers.

Charlie Hebdo’s Philippe Lançon is a writer I deeply admire. A 2011 recipient of the Hennessy Prize for excellence and French journalist of the year in 2013, he is an expert on Latin American literature. This autumn, Lançon was meant to be teaching at Princeton. Instead, he’s still in hospital getting his face rebuilt. Below is my translation of what he had to say about the PEN circus.

The Noble Blind by Philippe Lançon

“A few physical problems due to the attacks on January 7 will keep myself and others, alas, away from American PEN’s presentation to Charlie Hebdo of their Freedom of Expression Courage Award. I don’t imagine that I, any more than my colleagues and friends, attribute any special courage to myself. As for freedom of expression: like them, I grew up among publications that welcomed me without much thought about it. That’s the extent, for better or worse, to which it composed the very air we breathed. Should we have been more aware of this privilege? Should we have felt more responsible, searched to find a ‘happy medium’? I don’t think so. An excess of consciousness can reduce one’s liberty, one’s fantasy, and one’s imagination. It increases not discipline but an over-seriousness. Such a spirit would kill Charlie.”

“Once more, it’s worth a reminder: in 2006, when we published the caricatures of Mohammed, we were on our own. On the one hand, we were reproached for having failed the Muslim working class; on the other, for displaying drawings in bad taste. On the one side, ideologues and cowards, on the other, referees of elegance. All these fine folk who pretended to believe that Charlie had to weigh our choices in the same way (and according to the same criteria) as a government, an NGO, a museum curator, the owner of a tea-salon or a paper like Le Monde. Yet this fable involved a satiric weekly: our own and one with a specific history and politics. One that obliged no one to buy it; one that never even made it up to the front in kiosks.”

“Given this it seemed to me the commemoration of Charlie by an institution such as the PEN Club could be categorised as a comic coincidence. It recalls that famous encounter on the symbolic dissecting table, between an umbrella and a sewing machine. At least that’s how I was thinking, until the moment we learned that a troop of noteworthy writers, well-known and Anglo-Saxon, most of them from a multicultural universe, were refusing to take part in the ceremony. Of course these writers are free not to rally around Je suis Charlie, free to distrust any collective feel-good movement and free not to show up at the PEN Club. Charlie is sufficiently fed up with institutions not to become, in our own turn, one of those places where it’s crucial to show yourself as a righteous thinker, to further a career and feel loved.”

“It’s not their abstention which shocks me; it’s the character of their arguments. That novelists of such a quality – Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachael Kushner, Taiye Selasi – came to utter so many misinformed idiocies so tersely, with all the vanity of saintly souls… That’s what saddens the reader in me. Even if that reader knows, from experience, that any good writer is never anything more or less than a good writer. Just someone who knows how to build a thing of beauty, something surprising and intelligent yet someone who outside their art might, alas, think or write almost anything.”

“Compressed into a few sentences, their half-baked argument goes: “These attacks are deplorable. But don’t count on us to defend a racist paper, to admire a journal that’s hurtful and lacking in taste, a journal that is emblematic of a moralising country. Not with so many people, victims of the West, dying all over the planet.” American Teju Cole, fired the first shot in an online article titled “Unmournable Bodies”, published January 9 by the New Yorker. By basing itself in complete ignorance of the thing it denounced – the story of a publication, Charlie Hebdo, that the author almost certainly never read, but also on the political and social context of France as a country – his text revealed the stupidity of endemic American moralising. Bad faith did the rest; unashamedly, Cole misinterprets Cabu’s famous drawing It’s hard to be loved by jerks. Well, it’s hard to be condemned by jerks who don’t read you.”

“The Australian Peter Carey, who is a good novelist, in his own turn denounces “French arrogance”. But is he talking about Charlie, about the reaction on 11 January, about the government or about France in general… perhaps since Louis XIV? All this is so confusing and smells so much like an urbane dinner where the wine flows too freely, that it’s better to just laugh at it. Best to conclude with Salmon Rushdie – who loves Carey’s work but who knows what he’s talking about – “If as a free-speech organisation PEN can’t defend and celebrate those who were murdered for drawing pictures, frankly the organisation is not worth their name. What I would say to both Peter and Michael and the others is that I hope nobody ever comes after them.” If we were acquainted, I would happily tell them the same. But I’ll content myself with reading their books in my hospital bed. While re-reading, before anything else, Joseph Anton’s An Autobiography: in which Rushdie relates with both humour and detail what comprises the life of a writer – and a man – condemned by a fatwa.”

MORE THAN MRS. SAINT LAURENT

Loulou de la Falaise (detail) from “Loulou de la Falaise”, Rizzoli

Why is Yves St. Laurent such a presence in Paris? It’s been a dozen years since he retired and six have passed since he died. Yet he’s the subject of two lavish movies and, this week, three new books. Does all of this tell his fans anything new?

The answer is – maybe yes.

Saint Laurent’s studio, 1977; pic: Guy Martineau, “The Studio of Yves Saint Laurent”,  Actes Sud

Le Studio d’Yves Saint Laurent, Miroir et Secrets or Yves Saint Laurent’s Studio comes from fashion writer Jéromine Savignon. It retraces the legend through a thoughtful essay, various YSL sketches and period photos. The result is a portrait of the designer at work in his heyday.

Fittingly, it is slim and beautifully put together; even the paper on which it appears feels luxurious. Plus, in addition to more prosaic sources, the text cites pensées by Duras, Proust and Rimbaud.

Loulou de la Falaise and Yves Saint Laurent (detail) from “Loulou de la Falaise”, Rizzoli

There would nothing better for the fashion fan at Christmas. Except that the little tome has serious competition: Rizzoli’s enormous Loulou de la Falaise. De la Falaise, who died in 2011, was an institution as well as a pillar of YSL. Although half British, she symbolised Parisian chic.

Yet her life story is stranger (and posher) than most fiction or film.

Loulou’s mother Maxime, who features largely in the book, also led a life one might term haute bohemienne. The wife of a French count and the lover of numerous artists, she had worked as a code-breaker during World War II. After it ended, she took up modelling in Paris.

Loulou de la Falaise (detail) in her own design from “Loulou de la Falaise” by Rizzoli

Reinstalled in London, Maxime was also close to the Bloomsbury set and, at one point, Rudyard Kipling was her neighbour. Supposedly, she baptized baby Loulou in perfume; according to family legend, it was Schiaparelli’s Shocking.

Rizzoli’s Loulou homage debuted during two events. One was the annual Month of the Photo, the other the literary festival Paris en toutes lettres. In a way, the volume worked for both. Its text is a lengthy hagiography, bursting with worshipful quotes. But the pictures tell a story of their own. It is less simplistic, more compelling.

Loulou's own boutique from "Loulou de la Falaise" by Rizzoli

Loulou’s own boutique from “Loulou de la Falaise” by Rizzoli

Despite her overwhelming heritage, Loulou constructed herself. This was a task she carried out with ruthlessness and ingenuity. Far from content with modelling, she made herself indispensable – not just to Saint Laurent’s work but in his life. As usual with such women, her role is hard to quantify.

Yet Loulou inspired, embodied, suggested…and criticised.

The photos here are carefully curated. Yet they show a woman of determination and resilience, as well as one who is almost always smiling. Its words stress her signifiers: innovative, elaborate costumes; unusual bouquets and the lavish jewellery she both wore and designed.

Brooch by Loulou de la Falaise; “Loulou de la Falaise” by Rizzoli

Loulou’s country house; “Loulou de la Falaise” by Rizzoli

Flower arranging, dress and interior decoration sound slight. Worse, they sound a little too merely “French” and “feminine”. Yet they were only facets of a bigger aesthetic presence, one that mesmerised not just Saint Laurent but an era.

These photos do, however, show you what he saw: someone with an eye just as exacting as his own. For both of them, self-presentation was a business. Loulou may have been a monster and Seventies style is not my thing.

Yet it’s hard not to feel unmoved in the face of this outsize title. It may not focus on Loulou’s role at YSL. Yet its visuals resonate with the assimilations – and the mystery – of inspiration.

Loulou de la Falaise (detail); “Loulou de la Falaise” by Rizzoli

Paris en toutes lettres offered great events. One of the best was Véronique Aubouy‘s Attempt to Summarise À la Recherche du temps perdu in One Hour. This wasn’t anything like the Monty Python gag. It was a writer and artist’s homage to how Proust has always changed lives.

Aubouy did this not just once, but four times.

Véronique Aubouy performing at the Musée Carnavalet; pic © Laure Vasconi/Musée de Carnavalet

Véronique Aubouy performing at the Musée Carnavalet; pic © Laure Vasconi/Musée de Carnavalet

I saw it at the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the city’s historic library. There it took place after hours, in low light, with the audience simply seated around the library tables.

Madame Aubouy strolled casually and spoke in the first person. She used not a single note yet delivered an evening of wit, empathy and emotion.

Bénédicte Ledru reading Proust in "Proust Read"; pic © Véronique Aubouy

Bénédicte Ledru reading Proust in “Proust Read”; pic © Véronique Aubouy

Aubouy has also created the work Proust lu (Proust Read). This amazing piece-in-progress, hundreds of hours long already, captures different people as they read from Á la recherche. By its end, the filmmaker will have filmed the whole work, live.

You can take a peek at it here.You can also check out Aubouy’s new book, À la lecture (To Reading).

Iliès Hasnaoui reading Proust in "Proust Read" © Véronique Aubouy

Iliès Hasnaoui reading Proust in “Proust Read” © Véronique Aubouy